But with 2014 ending as The Year of Violence — think Ferguson, Eric Garner, beheadings, school shootings, wars without end — a Jan. 3 marathon performance of Freud’s seminal work, “Civilization and its Discontents,” looms as far more meaningful.

If you remember Freud 1929 essay from when you didn’t read it in college, the father of psychoanalysis argued that aggression is not only humanity’s natural instinct — but that this “inclination to aggression constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization.”

In other words, we’re all in trouble unless we put ourselves on the couch.

“Humans conveniently forget that we are all inherently violent — and Freud's central point is that we delude ourselves into thinking we're angels,” said psychoanalyst Will Braun, who is organizing the reading along with the website, New Books in Psychoanalysis.

And modern Americans are just as much to blame as the rest of the world, Braun adds.

Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, with a cigar (which was just a cigar in this case).

(Max Halberstadt)

“To America, Islam is the infidel — we are liberators ... even as we invade a sovereign country,” he says. “Freud reminds us that we are all implicated in human violence.”

Sounds heavy. Fortunately, refreshments will be served at the six-hour event, which will include some big-name readers, such as novelist Michael Cunningham (“The Hours”) and philosopher Simon Critchley, and an interesting staging that will involve a ladder, we’re told.